Thursday, January 13, 2011

"Hold Onto Your Butts!"

Dinosaurs and a Trip to the Natural History Museum

(Recalling the events occurring on:)
JANUARY 10, 2011

If you've seen 'Jurassic Park', you recognize my title's reference to Samuel L. Jackson's cinematic gem of a quote. Fantastic flick; Spielberg at his finest. And it's one of my favorite books by Michael Crichton, one of my all-time favorite authors. 'Timeline' is another good one. But we can talk about great authors at another time.

Today, a few friends and I visited Britain's Natural History Museum! It's a HUGE building. I love the architecture. The only problem is that it's connected to the Science Museum, but not from the inside! And who do you think mixed up the entrances to the two? Yup, us. The Science Museum looked pretty cool though. Here's a preview from the only exhibit we visited before realizing our mistake, the space section:

The earth was showing this pretty cool animation of all the lights seen from space, but I missed it. Behind it is a replica of the Apollo 11 moon lander, the Eagle.

I love rockets. Just so cool.

So after I geeked out over all of the awesome space stuff, I found a map and realized we were in the Science Museum. I'll definitely be going back though - my inner geek is totally obsessed with space, science, and technology.

So we made our way back around the colossal structure to the Natural History side. It had some pretty neat stuff in it, so here follows some of the pictures:

The entrance to the one section was this sweet escalator that went up into a metallic planet-like structure

On the inside. It said some stuff on the walls, but I don't remember what it was

We went through the lava and inner earth (cool rocks and stuff) section, but nothing that really jumped out as being completely new and exciting. I love museums, and this one was awesome, but with natural history, they all have pretty similar stuff. It's very cool, just nothing that caught my eye as being worth blogging about - you didn't want to see a bunch of pictures of rocks, did you?

So Jenny and I split off and headed towards the dinosaurs for the good stuff! The museum was closing early around 6:00pm and it was around 4:45pm, so we made a dash for it! There's no way I can remember what dinosaurs are what, so I'll try describing them - there's no way I'm going to get the names though, but I'll do my best:

I believe the Latin name is A Giantus-Sloth-Likeus-Thingeus. Or something like that..

Jenny sizing up some giant fish thing. Dude was massive.

Found out what happened to Little Foot's mum.. Poor little dino kid just wanted some tree stars..

Little monkey man!

Big Bird!

Well, I would say 'Triceratops', but there's been some recent controversy over whether it's actually just a young form of 'Torosaur'. Oh well, I'm still saying 'Triceratops'. Just like Pluto is definitely still a planet.

A blurry dinosaur of the Blurriosaurus genus. Oops.

One of those one's that is still pretty cool, but is like the baby brother of the T-rex.

Weird-angle-osaurus

Immagetyouwifmytinyarms!osaurus. Yup, that's what it's called. Scout's honor.

Rawrosaurus

A couple dino bros hanging out. T-rex and Triceratops

WOAH! A wild T-rex has appeared!

I was actually kind of impressed with his animatronics. It wasn't too robotic and was pretty cool. Well done, chaps.

Then the announcer started kicking everyone out, so we headed to the exit. Here's a couple shots of the building though. Really beautiful stuff:

An inside bridge and archway

The main staircase. Reminded me of Hogwarts!

Outside.

Some lighted trees out front. Goodnight!

And that was all for that day! We probably didn't even see half of what the museum had to offer, plus there's still the Science Museum, so I'll definitely be heading back. Plus, it's free! Did I mention that? Almost all the museums and galleries have free general admission; it's fantastic! Afterwards, we went back and went to a pub called The Stamford Arms and got a free beer courtesy of the senior students at our apartment, Stamford Street! Cheers, mates!

Good music to look at dinosaurs with:
The New Pornographers - "The Jessica Numbers", off their album "Twin Cinema"
Favorite song off a thoroughly enjoyable album. Check them out!

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What's next, you ask? Stonehenge! Stay posted!
Cheers!

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